Are you aware that deportable aliens can circumvent immigration laws with the help of your member of Congress? Are you aware that more than 50 bills have been introduced in Congress this year that would grant special, private relief to individual immigrants fighting deportation? It’s instant amnesty through special legislation. And it’s been happening for years under the radar. Past and present beneficiaries have included smugglers, illegal aliens, and now a convicted murderer wanted in his home country for engaging in terrorist activity and participating in an assassination plot that left a prime minister and dozens of his family members dead. (More on him and his congressional sponsor in a moment.)

How does this happen and how can you find out if your member of Congress has sponsored such a bill?

These individual bills are ripe for corruption. Indeed, the Abscam scandal in the 1970s involved payoffs for the sponsorship of exactly these kind of private immigration laws, according to the Congressional Research Service. Here’s a list of private relief bills passed in the House between 1999-2005. The Hill has more background here.

As I reported in 2003, Democrats and Republicans alike continue to sponsor these “private relief” bills seeking to sabotage deportation efforts and award legal permanent residence to illegal alien and deportable immigrant “constituents.” Every time a private relief bill passes, the number of available visas for that year is reduced by the number of illegal alien/deportable immigrant recipients granted legal status/deportation relief through the special legislation.

The bills needn’t pass for the recipients to gain benefits. Mere introduction of the bills buys the deportable aliens time that ordinary, law-abiding citizens can’t buy in our court system.

Federal lawmakers pressure immigration officials into releasing illegal aliens while their private bills work slowly through Capitol Hill. If the legislation is turned down (which is rare), it doesn’t matter. The intended beneficiaries can be set free, adding to the more than 600,000 fugitives from deportation that the federal government has yet to track down.

One example I noted in 2003: Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., introduced H.R. 393, which would exempt from deportation a Mexican national caught trying to smuggle her illegal alien boyfriend (a gang member convicted of felony firearms possession and deported to Mexico after serving his sentence) back into the U.S.

Federal immigration law expressly forbids Pastor’s special relief recipient, Alejandra Arias Garcia, from being released from detention. But the immigration officials in Phoenix ignored the law at Rep. Pastor’s behest and set her free — to the cheers of the illegal alien lobby.

He’s a Bangladeshi military officer convicted of murdering the Bangladeshi prime minister and two dozen members of his family–including a 10-year-old boy and pregnant women–in 1975. The coup leaders declared Bangladesh an “Islamic Republic.” Some two decades later, democracy was restored in the country and the assassins were tried. Ahmed escaped to the U.S. in 1996 and has lived here illegally for 11 years.

A Venice man whom friends and family are trying to save from execution in Bangladesh is a “cold-blooded killer” who murdered a 10-year-old boy during a military coup in 1975, a relative of the slain child said Friday.

Mohiuddin A.K.M. Ahmed, 60, was tried in absentia in 1996, convicted of murder and sentenced to hang for his role in the assassination of President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh and seven family members. U.S. courts ordered Ahmed deported to face his penalty.

Ahmed, then an army major, says he manned a roadblock a mile from the president’s home, but thought the leader would be arrested peacefully. “Myself and others believed that the orders we received were lawful,” Ahmed said in a written statement. “At no time was I, or my troops, involved in any violence.”

But Sajeeb Wazed, the slain leader’s grandson, said Ahmed was one of the “actual shooters” who murdered the family in their Dhaka home.

“This wasn’t just a political assassination, this was a gruesome, gruesome murder,” Wazed, 35, said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.

Wazed said that staff members present during the rampage said that Ahmed was among a group of soldiers who shot the family’s security guards and barged into the home, now a museum whose walls remain marked with bloodstains and bullet holes.

The soldiers shot his grandfather on the stairway and pulled family members from their beds and fired at them, Wazed said. Among the dead, who were later buried in unmarked graves, were his pregnant aunt, grandmother and three uncles, including Russell, a 10-year-old boy, he said.

Wazed said staff members who were there told him that when Russell began crying and begging for his life, one of the officers took him downstairs to hide. But after another officer commented, “He’s going to be like a snake that grows up and kills us,” Ahmed and another officer went down and shot the child, Wazed said.

“Not only did Mohiuddin participate, he killed a child in cold blood,” Wazed said.

In a stark illustration of the “It ain’t over ’til the alien wins” deportation abyss that I’ve reported on for the last several years, Ahmed has been able to stay in this country through endless appeals. The feds began deportation proceedings against him nine years ago. He applied for asylum and lost in 2002. He then went to the left-wing 9th Circuit Court of Appeals–and even they rejected his bid (ruling here.)

The private bill introduced by congressman McDermott, known as H.R. 2181, aims to help Mohiuddin in a number of ways. First, it aims to stay the deportation order against him indefinitely. Second, it aims to release him from custody and bars the DHS from deporting him to Bangladesh, or to any country that has an extradition treaty with Bangladesh.

Third, it aims to grant a green card to Mohiuddin, which would allow him to get preferential treatment before all other green card applicants from Bangladesh. It also aims to grant him the card by reducing the number of green cards available to other Bangladeshis by one. Finally, it states that Mohiuddin will be allowed to seek asylum in any foreign country of his choosing.

Congressman McDermott’s bill also makes some extraordinary “findings.” The bill claims that Mohiuddin is an “innocent Bangladeshi citizen.” It also claims that the Bangladesh court “erroneously convicted Mr. Ahmed of murder and sentenced him to death.” It further claims that the trial and conviction are “sufficiently suspect as to warrant the immediate intervention” by the US government to prevent his deportation.

However, the claims in the bill directly contradict the ruling of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In its decision denying Mohiuddin’s petition the court wrote: “Ahmed failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that his in absentia murder trial and conviction in Bangladesh was fundamentally unfair and, thus, deprived him of due process of law. Therefore, the IJ properly relied on the conviction.” Mohiuddin failed to convince the US court that his trial was unfair.

The court did not find that Mohiuddin was “erroneously convicted,” or that the trial was “sufficiently suspect.” It felt that it was proper to rely on the conviction in the Bangladeshi court.

Therefore, the congressman’s claim that Mohiuddin is an “innocent Bangladeshi citizen” is not supported by the facts, and is also not something that Mohiuddin was able to convince any court of.

Furthermore, the US State Department has stated that Mohiuddin”s trial — a high profile trial observed by the world community and human rights organizations — followed due process.

The bill also claims that Mohiuddin was merely manning a roadblock on August 15, 1975, and that he “had no knowledge of, nor did he support, the violent coup that erupted that night.”

Again, this claim in the bill directly contradicts the 9th Circuit’s ruling. In the ruling the court wrote: “Ahmed is ineligible for asylum and withholding of removal for two reasons:

* Because he engaged in terrorist activity,

* Because he assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of others on account of their political opinion. Even his own account of his actions established that he assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of persons on account of their political opinion.”

Thanks to McDermott and the private relief bill process, Ahmed’s deportation–which was scheduled for last weekend–was stymied. A source tells me that Mohiuddin has filed another court case with the District Court in Central California asking for a stay of deportation citing Congressional action.

Federal immigration authorities want this convicted murderer/terrorist deported. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him. But thanks to one congressman, the authority and prerogative of the U.S. to throw out undesirable criminal aliens have been flagrantly undermined.

And the special relief process by which this is all possible has yet to be challenged or questioned by any lawmaker in Washington. Where do the major party leaders stand on this outrageously routine circumvention of immigration laws? Where does your congressional representative stand on McDermott’s bill? Or any of the other 50-plus private relief bills now on the table?

These are the people who are asking you to trust them with the shamnesty proposal’s promise that they will get tough with criminal aliens and deport law-breakers who violate the fantasy rules and regulations of Bush-Kennedy’s massive new guest worker programs.